A number of high profile e-businesses and security companies have come together to form a working group to discuss how to prevent distributed denial of service attacks

A major consortium of e-businesses has been formed to combat the threat from Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDOS).

The attacks, also known as ‘zombie attacks’ have resulted in disruption and the loss of millions of dollars of lost revenue to e-businesses in the past year.

The consortium will consist of sixty companies including KPMG, eBay, ISS, Yahoo!, Network ICE and Mazu Networks. Called the RFC2267 DDoS working group, it will concentrate on gaining better information on identifying and preventing these attacks, which use a vast number of zombie PCs to bombard e-businesses with messages that overload the servers.

“It is imperative that we in the industry take these attacks seriously,” said Henry Teng, senior manager at KPMG and chairman of the working group. “The Internet has proven to be an enormous change agent for how we do business. Now business must unite in how to master threats that have the potential to destroy a business – threats like denial of service attacks.”